I am about to be purchasing a laptop and I was wanting the advice of the
list. I know this can be a very personal topic for some people, but I have
to throw it out there anyway.
Here's my situation...I'm about to be attending a degree program in
Information Assurance and Forensics. I also have my own business doing a
variety of things computer related. At some point I would like to delve
more heavily into vulnerability assesment, penetration testing, and possibly
forensics. I'm looking for a laptop that will be flexible enough to meet
all these needs.
This is what my immediate plans for the laptop are: for my business, I need
to have some of the basic MS Office suite on it, as well as MS Publisher. I
plan on making it into a dual-boot machine with some flavor of linux. I
don't care to use a live linux CD because I want to be able to store logs,
settings, and other data onto the drive, and I hope to eventually use linux
for everything except the MS stuff that I have to use on occasion for my
business.
Because of the variety of things I plan on doing, I want to get one that has
a serial and a parallel port in addition to the USB that they pretty much
all come with now. It would be nice to have at least one PCMCIA slot as
well. I plan to do some wireless network assessment, so it needs to be
wireless capable, but for my purposes being able to attach an external
antennae for extra range isn't that important.
What I'm looking at right now is the Dell Latitude D600. I've supported and
purchased a lot of Dell desktop computers and have been very happy with them
and I have run Knoppix-STD on a Dell laptop and everything ran well. The
D600 has the ports I'd like.
Any thoughts or recommendations? Any capibilities that you think I've
missed?
Thanks,
David
